Captain
Paget's novel regard for his only child seemed to increase with the
familiarity of frequent intercourse. "I have had very great pleasure in
making your acquaintance, my dear Diana," he said one day, in the course
of a _tete-a-tete_ with his daughter; "and I am charmed to find you
everything that a well-born and well-bred young woman ought to be. I am
sure you have excellent reason to be grateful to your cousin, Priscilla
Paget, for the excellent education you received in her abode; and you
have some cause to thank me for the dash and style imparted to your
carriage and manner by our foreign wanderings."
The Captain said this with the air of a man who had accompanied his
daughter on the grand tour solely with a view to her intellectual
improvement. He really thought she had reason to be grateful to him for
those accidents of his nomadic life which had secured her a good accent
for French and German, and the art of putting on her shawl.
"Yes, my dear child," he continued with dignity, "it affords me real
gratification to know you better. I need scarcely say that when you were
the associate of my pilgrimage, you were not of an age to be available as
a companion. To a man of the world like myself, a young person who has
not done growing must always savour somewhat of the schoolroom and the
nursery. I am not going to repeat the Byronic impertinence about
bread-and-butter; but the society of a girl of the hobbledehoy age is apt
to be insipid.
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